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All teaching staff will need to interact with Learn Ultra, even if the course materials are hosted on Drupal. We have compiled links to instructions on the most common tasks you will need to perform in Learn below. If you do not see what you need below, please check out the following page, which has additional instructions and guidance materials on a range of other aspects of Learn Ultra: Using Learn as an Instructor.
Introduction to Learn Ultra: a series of short videos providing an overview of Ultra and how to navigate the site.
Adding and organising content:
Types of Course Content – start here to get a definition of the terminology used for content types in Ultra
*If you want to share a link with students to a file you have uploaded to the Content Collection for a course, you will need to adjust the permission settings in the Content Collection folder following these instructions from Blackboard.
Assessment and marking:
Please remember that the Course Secretary is now in charge of setting up most assignment submissions, so please contact the ITO about the creation of assignment submission boxes. Below we have provided links for guidance on accessing student submissions and how to give marks and feedback.
If you don’t use Piazza for your course, you can set up a discussion board in Learn. This can be linked to Groups, so that students can talk to their group members: Create and manage Discussions
Note: All students, the Course Organiser, and Course Secretary will be automatically enrolled on the Learn course via a feed from EUCLID. All other teaching staff (i.e. additional lecturers and teaching support staff) will be enrolled via a feed from the School’s own databases; teaching support staff will only be enrolled in Learn once their contract is confirmed in PiP.
This blog post is intended to help course organisers decide which platform is most suitable for their needs with regards to coursework submission and marking. Learn Ultra – and its accompanying Gradebook – is quite a different beast to Learn Original, and so I thought it work highlighting the advantages and challenges of each approach. For simplicity sake, I have highlighted only those assignment types which are commonly used in the School of Informatics. If you have a requirement which sits outside of what is listed below (eg a graded blog) please get in touch with us and we can talk you through further options.
Learn Ultra
Learn Ultra supports the following ways of assessing students online:
Exam (more about the history of using Gradescope for exam marking can be found here)
Scenario 1 – student submits one individual PDF for marking
Learn Ultra
Learn Ultra can accept multiple files and file types. If one PDF is submitted, this should be displayed in the marking interface (although there have been multiple problems with how Learn handles PDFs in its own reader – particularly on a Mac – and so users are encouraged to download the PDF and open in their native application). A space is provided for the marker to enter grades and feedback. Delegated grading can be enabled for large courses where marking is distributed amongst a team of markers. In addition, parallel marking is now supported in Learn Ultra. This allows two markers to mark the same submission independently, with the course organiser acting as reconciler. Please note: parallel marking can only be enabled for individual submissions (ie *not* group assignments).
Gradescope
The Gradescope Homework assignment can only accept one PDF file upload. Marking can be distributed ‘horizontally’ – ie different markers marking different sections of the submission. Like all the Gradescope assignment types, anonymous marking is supported intuitively – and can be enabled and disabled as needs dictate. A marking scheme can be created in advance, encouraging consistency. Rubrics can be created in advance, or ‘on the fly’. One of the main advantages of Gradescope is the ability to change rubric values mid-way through marking, with marks previously assigned recalculated automatically.
Scenario 2 – group assignment
Learn Ultra
Learn Ultra can support a group assignment. The workflow remains: the groups needs to be created, a group assignment is submitted, one member of the group submits on behalf of the group. This is marked and the marks / feedback are cascaded to each member of the group. Please note: parallel marking can *not* be enabled for a group assignment – nor can delegated grading. So this is best suited for courses with only one marker. Also, anonymity can not be enabled for group assignments.
Gradescope
Gradescope can now support group assignments. As with Learn Ultra, the marker(s) mark as normal, but the grades / feedback are cascaded to each member of the group. However, with Gradescope group assignments, the responsibility for creating the group falls to the student submitting the coursework. Unlike with Learn Ultra, anonymity can be enabled however double blind marking is also not supported.
Gradescope has a dedicated programming assignment type. Students can upload unlimited files, of any file type. Markers can build and use an autograder to automatically grade parts of the submission. Markers can also manually grade submissions. One of the main advantages of using Gradescope over Learn Ultra for programming assignments is you can perform a code similarity check within Gradescope.
* Please note: Gradescope Programming Assignments behave differently to Gradescope Homework assignments, in that the student can choose which submission they would like the marker to mark. Consider this when designing your assignment policy and communications.
Scenario 3 – multiple choice quiz
Learn Ultra
Learn Ultra has an inbuilt test functionality. Since the move from Learn Original, many of the question types are no longer supported. LaTex is, in theory, supported in Learn tests. However, in practice, this has proved problematic across the College and we currently do not recommend this approach.
Gradescope
Gradescope’s online assignment type can be used for MCQ type tests / quizzes. It has several advantages over Learn Ultra test:
a more intuitive interface for both question setter and student
you can use LaTeX and Markdown to format the question text
an in-built student preview (not available in Ultra tests).
Scenario 4 – marking by tutorial group
In the past, you may have appreciated the ability to mark by tutorial group in Turnitin. It is worth noting that Gradescope can now support this workflow. Please speak with a member of the ITO to help you set this up.
Summary
Gradescope provides a good user experience for all users and has become the default assessment platform for many courses across the School. We hope the above is useful, but please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you’d like to discuss specific requirements for your course.
If students are permitted extra time on timed pieces of coursework as part of their extended time adjustments, then you will need to set this up for any timed quizzes/tests on your course.
If you are a member of teaching staff, please ensure that you talk to the ITO about this before enabling it for any student on your course, as there are different types of extra time adjustments that a student may have and they will help clarify for your course how these need to be applied.
Below are links for how to add these extended time adjustments in the two commonly used coursework quiz/test platforms. For both Gradescope and Learn tests, you can set up an adjustment for a student that extends across a whole course and any timed assignments within that course or grant an adjustment just for one or more individual assignments.
Note: Due to an ongoing bug in Learn Ultra, if you upload feedback to submission box in Learn, it will not be visible to students. If you want to upload feedback for an assignment that students submitted to via Learn, follow the instructions below to create a new “item” directly within the Gradebook itself, which (for some reason!) allows students to view the feedback you upload. Update: This bug appears to have been fixed, but let us know if you encounter any problems with the visibility of feedback for students.
Go to the Gradebook in the course Learn page.
Add a new Item to the Gradebook by hovering over where you want to add it in the list and clicking on the purple (+) when it appears and then select “Add Item”.
Then make the following adjustments when the item settings window opens:
It will give the item the default name of “New Item and the current date”; change this to the actual assignment’s name to ensure that students can locate it easily.
We recommend keeping this item hidden from student view for now.
The due date doesn’t really matter for this, so you can leave it as the default of the current time.
Set the marking as required (points, percentage, etc.) and, if points, the maximum number possible for this assignment.
For “Mark category”, choose Assignment.
Add a description if you want, but it’s not required.
Press Save.
Download the Gradebook, selecting just the new item that you created. Make sure to tick the option to include Feedback (unless you just want to upload marks, in which case, leave it unticked). Choose to save it as an xlsx file and save it to your computer.
Open the file on your device.
Make sure that the header for Column G is the assignment you want to be uploading marks for (i.e. the item you just created in the Gradebook).
Input the marks in Column G.
Input the feedback in Column J, if you need to share this with students.
Note: Make sure you do not change the header of any of the columns or Learn may not be able to read the file properly when you upload the marks. If you need to copy and paste data from another spreadsheet, make sure that it aligns with the columns as laid out in the file you downloaded from Learn.
Save the file.
Return to the Gradebook in Learn and now select “Upload Gradebook”.
Choose “Upload Local File” and select the spreadsheet you have just saved. Once it has loaded, untick the option for “Select All” and just leave the assignment you want to upload marks for ticked. Click “Upload”.
Once Learn has uploaded the document, you will see how many students there are not marks for (i.e. those who did not submit the assignment) and also the option to post the marks that you just uploaded.
Before you post the marks, it’s worth quickly checking that your upload worked. Click on the assignment name and you will be taken through to a list of all the students on the course. You can then check the a few of their marks and feedback in Learn with your spreadsheet to make sure that the upload worked properly.
Note: If you only want to post marks to certain students, you can do that from this view. Just click the “Post” button next to the name(s) of the student(s) whose marks you are to post.
Once you are ready to share the marks with the students, Click to Post the marks. And then “Post All Marks” when the dialogue box opens.
Go back in to the Edit view of the assignment (by clicking the three dots … at the end of the row for it) and from the drop-down menu choose to make it “Visible to students”. Press Save. The students will now be able to view their marks and feedback for this assignment.
Login to your Learn Ultra course page and select the ‘Groups’ tab in the top horizontal menu. Select the name of the group set to which your group belongs.
Scroll to find the name of the group to which you want to send a message. Select the three dot menu icon to the right of the group name and select ‘Message group’ from the drop-down menu.
Compose your message. Select the ‘send an email copy to recipients’ checkbox if you want the students to receive an email copy in addition to the message within Learn. Press send.
With the introduction of Drupal as the host for course materials in Informatics, we want to provide clear guidance about how best to communicate with students in order to ensure they see all important information and to avoid duplication of effort or confusion about where to find what.
The Informatics OpenCourse site built using Drupal does not have a communication system built into it. That means that there is no way to draw someone’s attention to something posted on it via Drupal itself. The only sorts of things you might want to put onto Drupal is, for example, an “Errata” page to alert both students and any members of the public to something you realised was erroneous in the lectures slides you’ve shared.
For any communications you want to have with the enrolled students on the course, you need to do this via the course Learn page. The tools for this have changed a bit with the move from Learn Original to Learn Ultra, so we have outlined what your options are below.
We do recommend checking out our blog post on Signposting to students for some advice and examples of how best to communicate with students (and ensure they read what you say!)
Announcements (ILTS recommended tool)
Learn has a useful Announcements tool which allows you to post messages to students enrolled on your course. Announcements remain on the course site (unless you delete them) and they also appear in Activity Stream on Learn. When creating an announcement, you can select to send an email to all students with the same message. In a change from Learn Original, any new announcements appear as a pop-up the first time students log into your course after you have posted it. Students need to manually close the pop-up before they can view the rest of the course Learn page.
We recommend using Announcements (and opting to send them as an email, too) as the most reliable method to ensure that students on the course receive the information.
Notifications alert the user to activity on the course site. This may include new content being added or due dates for assignments. The default for notifications is a daily digest sent out after 5pm, however, these can be configured by each user so don’t assume a student has received a particular notification.
Other tools in Learn Ultra
You will see these tools, like Announcements, across the top menu bar on your Learn Ultra course page. Unfortunately, there is no way to hide the links from students for the tools which you are not using on your course (although this has been raised with Blackboard as something that would be very useful for them to introduce).
Discussions: This is Learn’s built-in discussion board tool. We strongly recommend using Piazza instead of this.
Messages: This is what IS has to say about the Messages tool — The Messages functionality allows instructors to send messages directly to students. However, as announcements are a more streamlined and comprehensive communication tool, we do not recommend the use of Messages.
TL;DR: We don’t recommend using Discussions or Messages. Announcements (with email option ticked) should be used for important things that you want to ensure students don’t miss and Piazza for more general chat/answering questions.
Where and how do students get notified?
IS have put together a helpful table comparing where students will see notifications for the different ways that staff might communicate with them. Some of these tools will be used more/exclusively by teaching staff and others by ITO/admin, but it’s worth being aware of all the details.
Many of the learning technologies we use for teaching in the School of Informatics are integrated into Learn via LTI links, which ensure that user information (e.g. name, email address, and student number) are fed from Learn through to the other tool. Examples of these are Gradescope, Piazza, Zoom, Media Hopper Create and Replay, and CodeGrade. This also means that information can be fed back from these tools to Learn, e.g. marks in Gradescope added to Learn’s Gradebook. Many of these tools, including Library Resources, Media Hopper Replay (aka Lecture Recordings), and Piazza are included on all Informatics courses automatically through our School Learn template.
The process for adding these tools to a Learn page for students to access has changed in Ultra. Please follow the instructions below on how to add a link to these tools on a course Learn page for students and other staff enrolled on the Learn course to access. (Click on any of the screenshots below to open them full size.)
Navigate to the place in Learn that you want to add the link (this might be within a folder, e.g. for an assessment submission) and click on the plus (+) sign where you would like to add it on the Course Content page. You can see that the Gradescope link has already been added below using these steps and, for this demo, we will be adding a link to Piazza below it.
From the pop-up list of options that opens, select “Content Market”.
When the Content Market screen opens, navigate to find the tool you need. Do not click on the name of the tool, rather select the little plus (+) sign icon in the bottom right-hand corner for that tool, as shown below for Piazza QA.
You will then be taken back to the main course Learn page, where you can see that the Piazza QA tool has been added, as you can see below. You can use the three dot icon (…) to open the menu for the item and edit its name and/or description. Once you are ready for students to access it, make it visible to them.
With the new release of Noteable in August 2022, ISG have configured a new way to connect your Learn course to Noteable – Noteable LTI 1.3.
The Noteable LTI 1.3 integration has been successfully set up in Learn and Learn Ultra and the old connection method for Noteable will be switched off by 16th September. If there are any old links in any of your courses, they will break. Please simply delete them and add the new Noteable LTI 1.3 instead. Instructions below.
Step 1. Select the Noteable LTI 1.3 link from the Tools menu.
Step 2. Check the settings and then click on Submit.
Step 3. The Noteable link will appear in the Learn course page. Click on it, it will launch on a new tab.
A year after first being licenced at the University, Zoom is now 1) licenced to cover teaching and 2) integrated within the University Learn VLE. Both of these changes should benefit many teaching staff (and students) within the School. When first licenced and implemented within the University teaching was not covered within the Zoom licence. This has now been changed.
And over the summer 2021, Zoom was integrated within the Learn VLE, which allows staff to schedule and access Zoom meetings within their Learn courses. After adding the Zoom tool to a Learn course, staff and students will be able to access a course-specific meeting schedule and cloud recording library and the scheduler will display all meetings scheduled for the course.
More details on Zoom, the integration with Learn and the training available for using Zoom are available from the ISG website here. Support for Zoom is available from IS.Helpline@ed.ac.uk.
The Informatics Teaching Festival is back for a second consecutive year.
Join us for the opportunity to:
hear interesting presentations around lessons learned in the past year and good practice in online/hybrid teaching from colleagues and inspiring speakers from other schools
listen to the feedback provided by student representatives regarding their experience with studying in an online/hybrid context
listen to the feedback provided by teaching support and administrative staff as to their experience with teaching and administration this past year
learn about new approaches to teaching and educational software
share your own experience with teaching delivery, student support and course administration during workshops and informal GatherTown meetings
reflect and come up with ideas together for improving our delivery of online and hybrid teaching, both as a school and in our different courses.
If you’d like to attend any of the following sessions, and are not a member of the School of Informatics, please register your interest here, and a Collaborate link will be emailed to you in advance of the session(s).
